The inspection, evaluation and protection of critical infrastructure along railroad right-of-ways are necessary operations for a secure rail system. Tunnels, bridges, rail yards and track beds may each introduce critical security concerns, and may require frequent maintenance. U.S. railway companies and transit systems typically employ security measures, but are not able to adequately cover over 160,000 miles of domestic rail, including more than 210 transit tunnels.
This complex and extensive critical infrastructure provides innumerable targets for terrorists, and creates infinite safety and maintenance issues. Rail incidents are capable of impacting large communities and creating major service disruptions, injury and loss of life, ultimately resulting in expensive losses, mitigation, and repair and replacement actions.
The use of unmanned vehicles could provide a tremendously cost effective solution to the current security and incident response efforts for the transportation industry or any industry that uses rail systems, while additionally facilitating maintenance activities. Thus, it may be desirable to define a system and devices that can be easily deployable to gather data in remote locations associated with a rail system. However, such devices must be robust in terms of both their data gathering and communication capabilities, while remaining flexible enough to maximize their ability to be deployed.